One scientist's battle to combat climate change

Updated 10:59 am, Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Ken Caldeira, one of the world's foremost scientists of climate change: "We're really pushing the Earth into uncharted territory."

Ken Caldeira, one of the world's foremost scientists of climate change: "We're really pushing the Earth into uncharted territory."

Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle

One scientist's battle to combat climate change

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One morning in early February, climate scientist Ken Caldeira stood ankle deep on Australia's Great Barrier Reef, shielded from the glare in a floppy blue sun hat.

He and his research team were pumping the equivalent of antacid over a patch of corals that emerges from the sea at low tide, attempting to re-create the conditions before carbon dioxide emissions from cars and factories began altering ocean chemistry.

By tracking how much of the substance the corals absorbed, they hoped to be able to detect - for the first time - how ocean acidification is affecting reef growth.

No one had been able to carry out such a test before in the wild, because no one could figure out how to conduct a controlled chemistry experiment in the middle of the ocean. In effect, Caldeira found himself a petri dish in the form of those exposed corals 60 miles off Queensland, the only such formation across the entire Great Barrier Reef.

That perspective has made Caldeira, 56, one of the world's foremost scientists studying climate change. But it's a field he turned to only after forays into philosophy, punk rock and political protest - and that spirit of art and activism continues to inform his work.

His insights have pushed him into an unusual position in the heated debate over global warming: A prominent scientist loudly advocating for sweeping public policy changes.

He's also courted controversy by pursuing and pushing for research at the outside edges of atmospheric science, exploring the possibility of manipulating the climate itself. He fears that only drastic measures might now prevent full-scale ecological disasters - if, at this point, they can be avoided at all.

The scientist

Since 2005, Caldeira has worked at the Carnegie Institution in a modern wood-and-stucco building on the Stanford University campus. Most days, he commutes from his home near Redwood City on a baby blue Vespa.

On arrival, he pulls off his helmet to reveal a ruddy complexion and mop of curly brown hair. He walks up to a small, second-story office, where photos of glaciers and volcanoes cover the walls. Here, he spends most of his days in jeans and sweaters, stationed before dual monitors atop a cluttered desk. He works with researchers, writes papers and communicates with journalists. And, when he's not out treading across coral reefs, that's pretty much it.

He used to spend days and weeks traveling to present lightly attended lectures, but about 2 1/2 years ago decided to streamline his priorities. His father had just passed away.

"You realize life is finite and you'd better be doing the things you want to do," he said.

He stepped up an already aggressive research pace that's produced nearly 150 papers on climate and related issues, earning more than 12,000 citations in the scientific literature. His work covers a range of topics, but the narrative thread that runs through it goes something like this:

Intensifying ocean acidification, a term Caldeira popularized a decade ago, threatens the world's coral reefs and at least the quarter of all sea life that lives among them.

Left unchecked, the human toll promises to be profound but uneven: improved crop yields for some; famine, upheaval and natural disasters for others.

There might have been a time when incremental adjustments could have minimized these dangers, Caldeira said. But after decades of ignoring the mounting evidence on climate change, there is little choice but to cut emissions to basically zero.

And even if we get serious about all that right now, the world still might need science fiction-worthy options to prevent calamity: so-called geoengineering schemes such as whitening clouds or spraying particles into the stratosphere to reflect more of the sun's rays back into space.

The messenger

Caldeira used to direct his message to politicians, testifying before Congress on a number of occasions. But he came to realize they don't take their policy cues from experts. They take them from lobbyists and voters.

So now he tries to speak directly to the latter. He writes for popular magazines and produces YouTube videos about his research, even tapping in to his musical past to create background tracks.

He makes more time for journalists than many of his peers, taking pains to help the science go down with colorful sound bites and metaphors: We can no longer afford to use the atmosphere as a waste dump. Emitting greenhouse gases is the equivalent of mugging little old ladies. Coal power plants are immoral and ought to be illegal.

Caldeira sometimes struggles with the dueling roles he plays: the scientist seeking out facts; the human being who believes those findings cry out for change. But, he says, he and his peers have been outgunned for years by skeptics willing to distort the facts, while scientific findings have been demoted in the public mind to the equivalent of ideology.

"The rejection of climate science is another manifestation of the medievalism that's permeated our society, where we don't recognize a shared reality," he said.

The compromise he's made is that his values can reflect the questions he asks in science, so long as the results speak for themselves.

"The answer shouldn't involve values," he said. "They should just be empirical facts."

The activist

Caldeira grew up in the suburbs of New York City, studied philosophy at Rutgers University and landed in Manhattan in the late 1970s. He moved in art circles that overlapped with the orbits of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. He played bass for a punk rock band, Fist of Facts. And he was a devoted activist railing against nuclear weapons and power (though he's since changed his view on the latter).

Despite his peacenik credentials and long hair, Caldeira jokes he was the early "sellout" in his crowd because he worked on Wall Street, doing programming for investment banks. Still, he wasn't enough of a sellout to stay out of jail.

In October 1979, after the partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island plant, Caldeira joined a protest in front of the New York Stock Exchange. He was hauled to jail in the suit and tie he'd worn to work. He was arrested again a few years later demonstrating at the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant on Long Island. Not surprisingly, his Wall Street fling didn't last long.

"I decided I'd rather make less money and be more fulfilled and happy, than make money and be depressed," he said.

After reading ominous reports about global warming, he decided to study atmospheric science at New York University, where he would eventually earn his doctorate.

"Right away, I think most of us could tell this was really a brilliant guy," said Martin Hoffert, professor emeritus of physics at the university. "He was burning with curiosity."

Caldeira spent part of the last year of his doctoral studies in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), studying under the late Mikhail Budyko, the scientist credited with first proposing injecting particles into the stratosphere to alter the climate. Caldeira encountered the idea there, as well as a pretty woman named Lilian, but at the time he only paid much attention to the latter. They were married in 1991 and together raised a boy, now 24, Caldeira's stepson.

Two years later, he landed as a postdoctoral researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He remained there for a dozen years, making his mark as a climate modeler with novel approaches and serious computer chops.

The skeptic

One afternoon in July 1998, Caldeira sat among a roomful of scientists at the Aspen Global Change Institute in a state of disbelief.

Lowell Wood, the big, disheveled astrophysicist and archconservative best known as the Pentagon's go-to weapons developer, was delivering a deliberately provocative talk.

Wood told his audience that spraying sulfur particles into the stratosphere would handily offset global warming, essentially mimicking the effect of huge volcanic eruptions that had cooled the globe in the past. Nuclear war would be another quick fix, he said, because it would decimate a huge portion of humanity and its energy infrastructure.

Caldeira, the former antinuclear activist, bristled at the idea of pumping chemicals into the atmosphere to counteract the chemicals we're pumping into the atmosphere. He also was convinced it simply wouldn't work, and set up a rigorous computer simulation to prove it.

Instead, to his surprise, the results suggested Wood was basically right: There just might be a knob on the global thermostat within our reach.

And so, without intending to, Caldeira lent his considerable scientific and environmental credentials to an idea that makes him deeply uncomfortable to this day. He helped push geoengineering into the scientific mainstream.

The apostate

In the years since, Caldeira has continued to publish research on geoengineering. He also co-manages a fund established with money from Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates that invests in early research.

It's the most controversial area of Caldeira's work, sharply dividing those calling for action on climate change.

The suggestion that scientists can take control of Earth's climate strikes many as hubris, akin to playing God. Others worry that talk of technological solutions eases the pressure to stop pulling fossil fuels from the ground.

There are scientific objections as well. Some evidence suggests that stratospheric injection could deplete ozone levels and alter monsoon patterns in Asia and Africa, potentially affecting food supplies for billions of people.

"That's an extremely serious threat," said Wil Burns, director of the energy policy and climate program at Johns Hopkins University.

Caldeira's own research has found that geoengineering would actually increase world crop yields by reducing the heat stress caused by global warming.

Still, he insists he doesn't advocate geoengineering. What he advocates is cutting greenhouse gas emissions as rapidly and dramatically as possible.

But that's not happening, even as years go by; temperatures creep up and predictions turn gloomier. He worries that some stopgap measure eventually may be required to avoid disaster. So he believes it's only responsible to research the risks and benefits of geoengineering now.

"I am in favor of fire insurance," he once said in explaining his stance. "But I am also against playing with matches while sitting on a keg of gunpowder."

NYU's Hoffert, who has co-authored several papers with Caldeira, said his colleague's reversal on geoengineering reflects an intellectual integrity and open-mindedness that serves science well. As does his eventual friendship with Wood, whom Caldeira still jokingly calls a "right-wing nut."

"Most people want to run away from contradiction and live in a bubble," Hoffert said. "But sometimes you can live a much more interesting life, and have a lot more interesting ideas, if you don't."

The realist

In late March, Caldeira was back in his office at Stanford, sifting through the results of his field work in Australia.

He and German postdoctoral researcher Jana Maclaren were hunched over a crinkled sheet of paper cluttered with scientific formulas. A lengthy column of data from their reef experiments cascaded down one of his monitors. They were searching for statistically meaningful clues in the ocean of information, not at all certain they'd find any.

This is the tedious, everyday work of climate science, the part that takes place far from threatened reefs or clashes over public policy.

Ask him why he does what he does, and Caldeira offers the simplest of answers: He wants to do things that are meaningful and fun.

On this day, as the pair discussed "error propagation" and "linear regressions," the fun part was difficult to see. Meaningful was easier to grasp.

Science is telling Caldeira the planet is in grave trouble. So he is telling anyone who will listen, and attempting to tell those who won't, through any means he can. If he's right, and if enough people finally hear the message and respond, meaningful could add up to something like saving the world.

Right?

This time, his answer is not so simple.

"I don't know what that means," Caldeira said. "I feel that emotionally, but intellectually I'm kind of an existentialist."

Perhaps that's the philosophy major more than the scientist speaking. Or maybe the man with as clear a view of the planet's fate as anyone has seen too much to be that hopeful.

"We got hit by a meteorite and knocked out the dinosaurs," Caldeira said in his next breath. "And we're another meteorite."

About this story

This profile is part of "Taking the Heat," an ongoing Chronicle series on Bay Area researchers who are working to contain climate change. To see other stories and videos in this series, as well as accompanying pieces for this article, please go online to: www.sfgate.com/takingtheheat.

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